Specialists from the training department of the Armenian NPP visited the Balakovo NPP, with the support of the WANO Moscow Center.

The international visit was dedicated to the study and exchange of best practices in the sphere of personnel training.

During the five-day meeting, the staff of the training center of the Balakovo NPP introduced their Armenian colleagues to their system of training and maintaining qualifications of personnel, the topics of classes and the technical equipment of classrooms and laboratories.

“Our educational and training center, which was founded in 1987, is a full-fledged institution of professional education,” said Aleksey Negodyaev, deputy head of the Balakovo NPP training center. - All instructors of the center are specialists with higher education and extensive experience of work at the nuclear power plant. The structure of the center includes several departments for personnel training, a department for educational and methodological support, organization of training and maintenance. The instructors of the center develop not only training materials, but also a strategy for the professional development of plant employees. Last year alone, 2,252 people were trained under the qualification maintenance program, and 2,100 specialists were trained to improve their qualifications."

Armenian experts got acquainted with the practices of the Balakovo NPP in preventing personnel errors, preserving critical knowledge on which the safe operation of the nuclear power plant depends. They also attended several practical sessions conducted on a full-scale simulator - a digital analogue of the prototype power unit of the Balakovo NPP, watched the training of changing the control room according to various training scenarios.

“The idea of this benchmarking appeared in 2017, during a technical support mission for the WANO Moscow Center at our nuclear power plant. A visit to the Balakovo nuclear power plant to study the activities of the training center was one of the proposals of the WANO experts,” stressed Agaron Manukyan, deputy head of the training department for teaching aids of the Armenian NPP. “At our plant, we are also conducting systematic work on personnel training, and the practices that we met here will be very useful for improving our work. We were especially interested in the methodology of Balakovo colleagues for the preservation of critical knowledge”.